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The intensity with which Australians possess and use consumer electronics is famous. Indeed, by using videos and computers, Australian artists have managed to avoid what has been called ‘the tyranny of distance’. For artists like John McCormack (Melbourne, 1964), the computer has become a way to escape the limitations of the physical world. An Eccentric Orbit: Video Art in Australia presents a selective look at a varied and abundant field: contemporary electronic artworks produced in Australia between 1980 and 1995. The programme is divided into three thematic sections. The programme entitled The Body Electric contains works that contemplate falling into a physical and psychological trap, proposing a release through dreams, technology and the imagination. The second block, entitled Any Resemblance to Reality is Purely Deliberate, deals with the magic of construction and deconstruction in or by the computer culture, while the works included in the section Reduced Paradise reflect on place and the lack of location. The themes in each programme represent what could be considered the three concerns of contemporary Australian culture condensed into the work of video artists and directors. Obviously each of these themes refers to the gestalt of a culture immersed in the post-industrialist dualisms found in all western civilisation: the active construction of the ‘perceived’ polarities between nature and culture, nature and technology and human beings and technology. However, without openly resorting to an ‘Australian’ iconography, most of the artists in these three programmes present a curiously idiosyncratic approach to electronic culture, resulting in a reflection on video and computer storage devices, the most easily transportable media available to artists. These same media are also extremely useful for citizens living in a country that can only be reached by an almost daylong flight from Europe and even longer from the East Coast of the United States.

In 1990, the Cinemadart festival in Barcelona brought together a dozen prestigious Spanish specialists to reflect on different questions related to the conjunction of surrealists, surrealism and film. The Surrealist Gaze is a film and video series that compiles the criteria of the retrospective put together by Julio Pérez Perucha to illustrate those debates.

Video Signals: Aspects of Spanish Video Creation in Recent Years is an audiovisual series that features 40 works by more than 35 artists made between 1988 and 1995, designed to offer a view/review of recent Spanish video. The exhibition was not conceived as a ‘who’s who’ of video in Spain - i.e., the artists with the longest careers and biggest reputations - but rather as a type of critical anthology, to borrow from the world of literature. The selection is neither indiscriminate nor whimsical, the range neither wide nor narrow, but spacious enough to include some new contributions andones that might have passed unnoticed on other circuits. However, no attempt has been made to cover specific genres or subgenres - such as the standard music video clip, video dance, art documentary and the occasional television productions with an experimental touch - even though the selection does include some pieces linked or contiguous with them. In any case, the selection is admittedly partial in every sense of the word.

Wanderers: Reflections on Exile is a video programme that ‘upsets’ the relationship maintained with Spain and the identity of individuals in society, looking at the margins to take stock of the occasional pleasures and evils that result from different types of exile: physical exile, made up of political exiles, refugees, self-declared ex-pats, immigrants and ‘perpetual travellers’ and mental exile, made up of insane, alienated, depressed, marginalised, unconscious and creative people.

This series features a selection of pieces from the World Wide Video Festival ’95 that highlight the diversity and limits of video art today. Video has never been a ‘pure’ medium, since it can be combined with and complemented by film, photography, performance art and, increasingly, computer techniques. The range of aesthetic and formal focus points, from an almost pictorial poetic narrative to abstract explorations of electronic chaos, is very wide. Free from the restrictions imposed by television and film advertising, video artists enjoy complete freedom to choose their own formats. Beyond the documentary genre, many concentrate substance and content into short but powerful audiovisual declarations.

With a view to providing a multi-disciplinary overview of Eugènia Balcells’ (Barcelona, 1942) career as an artist and as a complement to the exhibition being shown on the third floor of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, her experimental films from the 1970s are being screened. In addition, two sessions of the performance piece Imágenes para sonidos will be staged with the collaboration of musicians Peter van Riper and Llorenç Barber.

Choreographing for the Camera is a film, video and conference series on the concept of video dance that includes audiovisual pieces somewhere between dance, film and video created by directors, choreographers and dancers working together. To reconstruct the process since Merce Cunningham and Nam June Paik made their first video dance piece, it is important to remember that modern dance and film have been conjoined since the outset and have had cyclical moments of intense collaboration. The appearance of video - the tool closest to avant-garde movements - at the time of the ascendency of the creation of contemporary dance in the United States and Europe rekindled a desire to experiment among choreographers. The possibility of participating in the great communicative power of audiovisual media tempted many young choreographers who found new staging spaces and new ways of reaching in the public in images. The 1980s were a golden age for video dance productions, especially in France and Belgium, where public institutions decisively supported their creators. Festivals and shows like the Centre Pompidou’s Video Danse and competitions like Grand Prix and Dance Screen organised by the International Music + Media Center (IMZ), became meeting points for the profession and a thermometer of the quality and quantity of productions in the genre, and also revealed the growing interest of television programmers. It was during these years as well that video dance began to appear in Spain: La Mostra de Video-Dansa in Barcelona was a driving force, not only from the point of view of dissemination, but also in terms of production in the country. In Madrid, festivals like Madrid en Danza provided annual grants, while the Metrópolis (TVE) and Piezas (Canal+) programmes regularly broadcast national and international video dance programmes.

Computer-generated images and interactive virtual reality systems, both products of a graphic evolution in images and the historical development of the interaction between artist, artwork and viewer, have heralded a complete transformation in traditional art practices. Everything Flows: Spanish Computer Graphics is a collection of videos that illustrate this important transformation in Spain through a selection of some of the most outstanding works of the last ten years, from the first computer-generated piece by Juan Carlos Eguillor (San Sebastian, 1947 - Madrid, 2001) to works made in the sphere of virtual reality by Águeda Simó and telematic projects by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico City, 1967).

On This Side of the Channel: British Video Art is a retrospective made up of four programmes of video art, computer animation and other creative works produced for commercial television in the British Isles that stand out from other electronic works because of their originality and the quality. Spanning a quarter century (from the first formal experiments to recent projects using more sophisticated technology), this programme presents a revealing record of British artists who have used electronic media to make important, vibrant creations as an alternative to commercial television. The first set of works, grouped under the title A Brief History of British Video Art: 1975 - 1990, offers a historical overview of video art projects that includes works by David Hall (Leicester, 1937), Jeremy Welsh (Gateshead, 1954), Mona Hatoum (Beirut, 1952) and Keith Piper (Malta, 1960); the second, New British Video: 1990 - 1994, focuses on a short period of four years to highlight the richness of the most recent work, including pieces by Michael Curran (Scotland, 1963), Steve Hawley, Andrew Stones (Sheffield, 1960) and Terry Flaxton (London, 1953); while A Brief Introduction to British Computer Animation: 1968 - 1994 returns to a more extended timeframe to spotlight the most important examples from the world of computer graphics, almost from its very beginnings. The programme starts off with some of the first experimental projects done in the domain of computer-animated images, featuring artists like Tony Pritchett (England, 1938), Stan Hayward (England, 1930) and Darrell Viner (Coventry, 1946 - London, 2001), and ends with some truly surprising and sophisticated technological pieces, exemplified by Alan Schechner, William Latham (England, 1961) and Andrew Budd. Finally, the works grouped under the title Virtual Television focus on a highly innovative group of electronic pieces that were either especially produced for or premiered on British television, such as First Direct,directed by Marc Ortmans, A Short History of the Wheel (1993) by Tony Hill (London, 1946) and Stooky Bill (1990) by David Hall.

Video art, an art trend that uses video as its medium, has served as a form of expression for a large number of Spanish artists. It is relatively young: it was born at the end of the 1960s and, since the first works appeared, its evolution has been paired with technological advances in the medium. Video Art: The First 25 Years commemorates the first quarter century of this means of artistic expression with an anthological exhibition curated by Barbara London that includes 48 works in chronological order from the early years of video until the 1990s. The programme features North American artists such as Nam June Paik (Seoul 1932 - Miami, 2006), Bill Viola (New York, 1951), Gary Hill (Santa Monica, 1951), Laurie Anderson (Glen Ellyn, 1957), Peter Callas (Sidney, 1952) and Woody Vasulka (Brno, 1937). Taken as a whole, these works provide an exemplary review of the historical evolution of video and a great opportunity to become acquainted with its main trends.